The Night of the Generals

The six retired generals who stepped forward last spring to publicly attack Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s handling of the Iraq war had to overcome a culture of reticence based on civilian control of the military. But while each man acted separately, all shared one experience: a growing outrage over the administration’s incompetence. David Margolick learns what led some of the nation’s finest soldiers to risk their reputations and cross a time-honored line.

By late 2001, briefing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was familiar territory for Lieutenant General Greg Newbold. As director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Newbold, a three-star in the Marines, had done it many times since Rumsfeld had arrived at the Pentagon earlier in the year, and had come to know the routine: the constant interruptions, the theatrics, the condescension. But, according to Newbold, there was something different, and alarming, about one particular briefing around that time: the topic. It was about going to war with Iraq.

Only a few months had passed since the attacks of September 11. The war in Afghanistan was just under way; officially, the enemies were al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But what interested Rumsfeld now was Baghdad, Basra, and beyond. To Newbold and many others, Iraq seemed irrelevant to the problems America faced, and besides, things there appeared largely under control; Saddam Hussein had been more or less handcuffed through sanctions and other diplomatic measures. Yet here was a sign, one of several, that Saddam, and not Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar, was most on the Bush administration’s mind.

Around a conference table in the Pentagon’s E-ring, the brass gathered. Newbold sat next to Rumsfeld, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Richard Myers, to Newbold’s right, and Myers’s deputy, General Peter Pace, next to him. Nearby were Rumsfeld’s number two, Paul Wolfowitz, and his personal military assistant, Admiral Edmund Giambastiani Jr. Newbold began reviewing the plan to invade Iraq, several years old by that point, which called for 500,000 troops—a figure Rumsfeld summarily dismissed. Surely 125,000 would suffice, he said, and with a little imagination, you could probably get away with far fewer than that.

Newbold, who had spent his career commanding infantry and led the Marines into Somalia, believed that Rumsfeld’s figure was absurdly, dangerously low; the only question was whether he should say so. True, he’d risk Rumsfeld’s famously withering wrath. True, ultimate authority lay with the civilians. True, such objections should ideally come first from the superior officers sitting mutely nearby. And, true, war with Iraq still seemed far-fetched, even preposterous. So he said nothing. And now, billions of dollars and immeasurable heartache and more than 3,000 buried American soldiers later, he has not forgiven himself. “I should have had the gumption to confront him,” he says. “The right thing to do was to confront, and I didn’t. It’s something I’ll have to live with for a long time.”

Ultimately, Newbold did make his views known to superiors and colleagues, to no avail, and he left the Marines in the fall of 2002. For the next three and a half years, as the United States entered Iraq, then found its force too small for the job and utterly unprepared for the chaos and enmity it would encounter, he kept his opinions largely to himself. That’s what military men, even retired military men, invariably do. But one Saturday morning last April, he wrote a piece for Time magazine saying that Rumsfeld had to go. Around the same time, in Fox Island, Washington, Paul Eaton, a retired army two-star general who’d spent a year trying to build a new Iraqi Army, was also at his computer, writing the same thing. So, too, essentially, was another retired two-star, John Batiste, as he prepared a talk for some Rotarians in Rochester, New York, about his experiences in Iraq leading one of the army’s most storied divisions.

Three other retired generals—John Riggs and Charles Swannack Jr., of the army, and Paul Van Riper, of the Marines—weren’t writing anything at that moment, but when reporters reached them, they were all ready to spill. They agreed that Rumsfeld should be replaced, and for the same reasons: his disastrous management of an ill-conceived and, some felt, entirely unnecessary war, one in which an overly compliant military—the generals on the Joint Chiefs—had been complicit, or at least supine.

Donald Rumsfeld is now gone, and history’s first draft on him has been written. Not long ago, one of the most famous former military men in America, Senator John McCain, said Rumsfeld was, along with Robert S. McNamara, of Vietnam fame, one of the worst secretaries of defense ever, evidently thinking he’d get votes in his run for the presidency by saying so. But in a nation founded on civilian control of the military, in which generals fight wars but rarely take on their politically elected bosses, the spectacle of six retired generals, some intimately associated with an ongoing war, attacking a sitting secretary of defense was extraordinary, and, for some, extraordinarily unsettling. “Seven Days in April,” someone called it. On April 14, 2006, headshots of five of the generals dominated the front page of The New York Times.

Rumsfeld, characteristically, depicted it simply as the grousing of a few military mossbacks uncomfortable with change. With colleagues, he wondered who these six men even were, and how they purported to know him and his modus operandi so damned well. But recognizing their peculiar political potency, the Pentagon and the White House mobilized quickly to stanch the flow, trotting out other generals, retired and active, to defend Rumsfeld, then playing their trump card: the president of the United States, the self-described “decider.” George W. Bush backed his defense secretary, and for the time being, Rumsfeld stayed. And all those other disgruntled retired generals presumably waiting in the wings stayed quiet. They had lots of reasons. Speaking out, many of them believed, was improper, or disrespectful, or futile. Or risky, possibly antagonizing friends, colleagues, clients, and employers. Or inconvenient: who needed the notoriety, the phone calls from CNN and Al Jazeera, which quickly and predictably engulfed, and continue to beset, all six men? Or embarrassing, for it invited Rumsfeld loyalists to rummage through the generals’ pasts, looking for sour grapes.

Some scholars of military-civilian affairs said that the six had imperiled civilian control, undermined military mores and morale, jeopardized the military meritocracy and the trust between senior and junior officers. The time for these men to have spoken out, these critics said, was while they were still in uniform, through the chain of command; past retired generals with bones to pick had had the decency to wait for administrations to change before writing books, rather than popping off against incumbents in real time, practically before the ink on their retirement papers had dried.

People still debate whether the “revolting generals,” as Newbold facetiously calls the group, hastened Rumsfeld’s departure or, by getting Bush’s back up, actually delayed it. They can debate, too, whether the generals represented a threat to American democracy or an expression of its vitality, an ominous precedent or a one-off, stemming from a military fiasco and a single abrasive personality. Lots of people—active generals unwilling to criticize old friends, politicians ducking the cross fire, and some of the dissenters themselves—want to forget the whole thing ever happened. Few would deny, though, that it was a cultural milestone, a new level of coming out for senior officers at a time when every network already has its own battalion of uniformed talking heads, as well as a political watershed. “It became an important component of last year’s political season,” says Lawrence Di Rita, Rumsfeld’s former spokesman at the Pentagon, and the most public—and durable—of his defenders. “It became a snapshot that gave some credibility to anti-war Democrats and even anti-war Republicans.”

From the outside, the six insurgent generals looked suspiciously like a cabal, but there was nothing conspiratorial about them. While a few knew one another, their protests were not coordinated; to this day several have never met. For the most part, they were connected only insofar as one of them emboldened the next, and the next, and the next.

It is hard to conceive of a more improbable group of dissenters. Several are military brats who married military brats and begat military brats. With one exception—who, on principle, never voted at all—all had cast ballots for George W. Bush in 2000. That wasn’t unusual: to this day, none has ever voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, though this now may well change. All applauded when Rumsfeld was named to his post; some even initially favored his plans to streamline—or “transform,” as he termed it—the military. But most had soured on him before the public did, after, they believed, he had humiliated and marginalized four-star general Eric Shinseki, the much-respected army chief of staff, who in February 2003 publicly disputed Rumsfeld’s lowball estimates of the troops required for any Iraq war.

Though some of the generals had complained while on active duty about Rumsfeld’s handling of the war—and, they believe, were penalized for their candor—each had to overcome a lifetime of reticence before calling for him to be replaced. In doing so, each surprised his peers and even, it seems, himself. Several say they would never have spoken up had anyone else—the Congress, the news media, the four-star generals—done so first. All seem a little out of their element in the media glare, ingenuously candid, unaccustomed to the refuge of “off the record.”

With one exception, all are between 50 and 60 and, if they didn’t actually serve in Vietnam, were shaped—and haunted—by its legacy. They are generally thoughtful, soft-spoken, and articulate, belying the stereotypes of belligerent warriors. Some initially supported the war in Iraq; others had doubts from the outset. Some say they’ve only been praised for speaking up; two claim to have lost job prospects because of it. Most are glad they talked, but two have regrets; one said he would never do it again. All oppose a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq but view the “surge” as too little, too late, at least without lots of money and diplomacy thrown in. All recognize the limits of military power, as only military men can.

To retired four-star Marine general Anthony Zinni, the former head of United States Central Command (CentCom) who spoke out against the war from the beginning, thereby becoming a role model to the six, their performance was “a tremendous act of patriotism.” But Di Rita believes they both maligned Rumsfeld and hurt their country, rending the delicate fabric of civilian-military relations. “He was treated in some ways shabbily by these guys, who had ample opportunity to do it differently,” he says. “There can only be one president and only one secretary of defense at a time, and military officers get a vote, but only the way the rest of us do, and that’s through a secret ballot. It’s not through the front page of The New York Times.”

The Shot Heard Round the World

Among the six, Paul Eaton has one clear distinction. He was dealt the worst hand: to create a new Iraqi Army from scratch. That much was evident from the moment he landed in Kuwait early one morning in June 2003 to undertake the job. First, no one was there to meet him. Then no one had arranged to take him to Baghdad; he had to thumb a helicopter ride there. Then he couldn’t get into the Green Zone. Then, to build a new military force for 26 million people, he’d been given a munificent staff of five.

Eaton, a 53-year-old West Point graduate who’d commanded the infantry center at Fort Benning, Georgia, had gotten his orders barely a month earlier. The new force was a low priority to Rumsfeld, he says; it was called “the New Iraqi Corps,” or NIC, until a linguist on Eaton’s staff noted that nic meant “fuck” in Arabic. “It was stunning how cavalierly this whole thing was approached,” says Eaton, whose father, an air-force fighter pilot, had been shot down over Laos in 1969 and never found. But at first he was gung-ho. He scoured the Internet for information about Iraq, reread T. E. Lawrence, reviewed the histories of other occupations. Once in Baghdad, he set up an office in one of Saddam Hussein’s old palaces and augmented his skeletal team. But with the pre-existing Iraqi Army first disintegrating, then summarily dissolved by edict of the American provisional-authority administrator L. Paul Bremer III, the obstacles were daunting.

The Pentagon contracted out much of the project to the Vinnell Corporation, a private company poorly equipped to train drill sergeants and foot soldiers. It was mandated that each of the new platoons mirror Iraqi society, with appropriate percentages of Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds, who hated one another and, in some instances, didn’t speak the same language. Veterans of Saddam’s old army wanted their former ranks and salaries back, and didn’t like the girlie-man pink of their new Iraqi-made camouflage. Eaton’s entire budget was a paltry $173 million.

That September, Rumsfeld came by to assess Eaton’s progress. Amid the crystal chandeliers and broken toilets in Saddam’s old domain, he balked at Eaton’s enhanced, far more expensive plans for the Iraqi soldiers—“My God, it’s gold-plated!” he exclaimed—but soon promised Eaton everything he wanted, with an exponentially increased budget to match. There were hopeful signs: in October, the first battalion of 600 Iraqi soldiers graduated, and in January 2004, so did another 600. Eaton agreed to a second six-month hitch.

But then the problems caught up with and overwhelmed him. The funding Rumsfeld had authorized got enmeshed in the Pentagon bureaucracy. A contractor’s alleged links to the discredited Iraqi-exile leader Ahmad Chalabi led the Pentagon to cancel a mega-deal to supply weapons, trucks, body armor, uniforms—just about everything a light motorized infantry battalion would need—setting everything back months. The Americans who were to train the Iraqis arrived late, badly prepared, and in smaller numbers than promised. Then there was the growing insurgency, to which, Eaton says, Rumsfeld paid little attention: “Nation building, peace building, counter-insurgency—anything soldier-intensive was not his bag.”

At the time, Eaton was candid with reporters. It would take three to five years or more to field a competent Iraqi Army, he told them. The Americans training them were “on the ragged edge of our competence.” He conceded he’d feel “a whole lot safer” in Baghdad walking around in civilian clothes. U.S. GENERAL: IRAQ POLICE TRAINING A FLOP was the headline of one Eaton interview. Then, in April 2004, a battalion of Eaton’s newly minted Iraqi soldiers refused to fight. It helped doom Eaton’s military career. “I didn’t deliver a miracle,” he says. “And neither has anyone else.” The episode fed perceptions that Eaton’s replacement, General David Petraeus (now the overall commander in Iraq), essentially started from scratch, a claim that Rumsfeld and Petraeus have stressed is not true.

That same month, Eaton got his next assignment, a training position Stateside which was, for someone of his background and experience, a “clear indicator that my usefulness to the army was about at an end.” An alternative position at the Pentagon was no more appealing: “I thought I was looking at four more years of Rumsfeld, and that he would never allow me to be promoted to a three-star.” On New Year’s Day 2006, Eaton officially retired.

All along, his unhappiness with the Iraq war had “festered and festered and festered.” When, in February 2006, Thom Shanker of The New York Times called him, he was ready to unload. But only after reading Rumsfeld’s long-term projection for the military in the Quadrennial Defense Review—“an appalling document,” Eaton says, focusing on high tech in an era of counter-insurgencies—did he call for Rumsfeld’s resignation in a Times op-ed. It ran on March 19, the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion. The revolt of the retired generals was under way.

In a glass bookcase by the window in his living room, Eaton keeps his collection of books on the Iraq war. His wife, P.J., says he can read them only a few pages at a time because he gets too upset. Like most generals of his generation, he has read then major H. R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty, a 1997 study of the Joint Chiefs during the Vietnam War, whose thesis is that, by failing to stand up to Lyndon Johnson, the generals unforgivably shirked their responsibilities. “If [McMaster is] not outlining Take Two, someone else is for sure,” says Eaton. “We’re going to find out some really unpleasant things in the next few years.” He’s resumed writing his own memoir, which he’d shelved after speaking out, for fear people would see dollar signs in his dissent. He has no regrets about coming forward. One of his West Point classmates, he notes, was Dick Cody, now the army’s second-in-command. “If I were hurting my army, he’d pick up the phone and tell me to shut up,” Eaton says.

Eaton not only lives on the water but is a bit at sea. His new business cards say “consultant,” primarily because he doesn’t know what else he now is. Since he spoke out, several possible defense-related jobs have mysteriously dried up. “Maybe it’s the way I part my hair,” he says. In late January, his elder son, a 29-year-old Arabic linguist who is an army specialist, went to Afghanistan. His younger son, 27, an army captain who has already spent 14 months in Iraq, will probably go back before long. Eaton expects that, whatever the Americans do, Iraq will eventually split in three; the only question is how much more blood will be shed along the way. He fears there will be lots, much of it American.

Amid the gloom, though, he’s had some good news: shortly before Christmas, searchers in Laos found a fragment of his father’s remains. At last there will be a funeral.

Change of Heart

John Batiste, 54, may bear the greatest burden of the group. In the middle of Iraq, in the midst of the war, Batiste actually met with Donald Rumsfeld, who asked him point-blank whether there was anything that he, the commander of the First Infantry Division, had asked for that he had not in fact received. Batiste did not answer his question.

It happened on Christmas Eve 2004 in Tikrit. A few minutes earlier, Batiste had introduced Rumsfeld to a hundred or so troops, first reviewing his career for them, then describing him as “a man with the courage and conviction to win the war on terrorism.” The defense secretary thanked Batiste for his kind words and the extensive review of his bio. “Kind of makes me sound like I can’t hold a job,” Rumsfeld joked. Then Batiste, Rumsfeld, and a gaggle of reporters went to Batiste’s office, overlooking the Tigris River, in a marble-lined room in another of Saddam’s palaces. There seemed to be one for every American general.

It was then that Rumsfeld asked his question, and Batiste had his chance to do what the generals’ critics say they should have done: speak up while still in uniform. But Batiste says he was taken aback; the honest answer was, of course, “My God! Absolutely!” but he felt he couldn’t say that with all those reporters around. Rumsfeld, he believes, knew that, which was why he’d asked it when he did. “I felt, I’m being used politically,” Batiste says. “So I didn’t answer.” Instead, he paused for 30 seconds, then talked about how the Iraqi units he was training would soon take control of his area. “We’re on the verge of something great here,” he predicted then.

The can-do attitude was entirely in character: no general was a more reliable cheerleader for the American mission. But it was all an act, Batiste now says. Throughout Rumsfeld’s pit stop in Tikrit, Batiste was actually fuming: about Abu Ghraib, about the decision to disband the Iraqi Army, about Rumsfeld’s “shitty war plan.” But no one watching—including the reporters—would ever have known, nor did Di Rita, who had accompanied the secretary and who says the whole visit bordered on a “lovefest.” “Do I wish I’d said something in front of all that press there?” asks Batiste, who had served as Wolfowitz’s senior military assistant at the beginning of the Bush administration. “Maybe, but we don’t air our differences in public.” Di Rita says that if Batiste had wanted a private moment with Rumsfeld he could easily have had one. But even that, Batiste says, would not have helped. “I didn’t trust Rumsfeld a bit,” he tells me. “I had seen the way he treated other officers and discounted their advice. He wasn’t going to listen anyway.”

It wasn’t until over a year later, on April 4, 2006, five months after he retired, when the Rochester Rotary Club invited him to speak, that Batiste finally opened up—or, as he puts it, “crossed the line of departure,” faulting Rumsfeld as arrogant and dismissive and the war as misbegotten. No one in the audience that day asked him the obvious question—whether he believed Rumsfeld should be fired—but as the story climbed up the journalistic pyramid, it was inevitable someone would. On CNN a week later, Miles O’Brien did. “In my opinion, yes,” Batiste replied.

Anyone who’d known Batiste the soldier—straitlaced, buttoned-up, careful, cautious, enthusiastic—was floored. Even he seemed confused by what he was doing: as Greg Jaffe reported in The Wall Street Journal, Batiste—after an interview with CNN’s Paula Zahn in which he had been asked to judge the commander in chief—paced around the parking lot outside his office for half an hour, wondering whether he was doing the right thing. But he vowed to complete the mission, as the army had always taught him to do, and soon it was “Good morning, Diane” (Sawyer); “Good morning, Katie” (Couric); “Victory hangs in the balance, Wolf” (Blitzer); “Bill, I think … ” (O’Reilly); “I’ll tell you, Chris … ” (Matthews); “Bob, let me say that … ” (Schieffer); “Lou, good evening” (Dobbs); “You bet, Keith” (Olbermann); “I can speak for myself, Jim … ” (Lehrer).

As Batiste has grown more comfortable with the press, his rhetoric has sharpened. Talk to him at two- or three-week intervals and you can almost hear him shaking off the shackles of all those decades of regimentation. Even the honorifics have disappeared. “I was very respectful, referring to Rumsfeld as ‘the secretary of defense,’” he tells me, “but as time went on and the months progressed and the outrage grew, I dropped all that, and he became ‘Donald.’” A self-described “die-hard Republican,” Batiste has now spoken at a forum hosted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, shared a panel discussion with Vietnam-vet congressman John Murtha, and praised Senator Hillary Clinton, Democrats all.

Of the group, he was probably the most promising when the war began. Barry McCaffrey, the retired general (and former drug czar) for whom Batiste once served, had him pegged as a future chairman of the Joint Chiefs. As the only one of the dissenters to watch Iraq policy as it was formulated, then carry it out in the field, he was best positioned to object; for that reason, he is also the most infuriating to the dwindling remnants of Rumsfeld’s camp. He is the most guileless, with a ready explanation for why cats got the tongues of so many other generals every bit as disaffected as he: “Everyone’s working for defense contractors. Their bread is buttered by the Department of Defense.”

And Batiste—the son of an infantryman who died of a service-related injury, and son-in-law of a retired general who helped build the Green Berets—may be the most idealistic, or naïve: upon returning to the United States from Iraq in the summer of 2005, he simply could not believe how disengaged most Americans were from the war, and he continues to call for measures—special taxes, gas rationing, general mobilization—that simply would never fly with the electorate. Having savaged Rumsfeld, he is now attempting to salvage the crusade against Islamic terror. Of the six, he may be in the most emotionally precarious position: it’s not just the U.S. that’s facing crushing defeat in Iraq; he feels he is, too.

From March 2001 to June 2002, Batiste worked alongside Wolfowitz. (“Unflappable,” Wolfowitz later called him.) In that position, he saw the Iraq war take shape even before September 11, then saw the plan solidify. He was there that Saturday morning in early 2002, for instance, when Rumsfeld, unhappy with the proposed troop numbers, sent General Tommy Franks, the CentCom commander, packing back to Tampa with orders to come up with a way to do the war on the cheap. Batiste says he had doubts from the outset, but though he had Wolfowitz’s ear daily, he didn’t bend it; someone else, he thought, surely would. “I didn’t always agree with his thinking,” he says, “but you have a certain amount of trust that your government and its apparatus will look at all sides of something before they go to war.” (He and Wolfowitz no longer speak, and Wolfowitz, now president of the World Bank, would not speak to VANITY FAIR.)

In the spring of 2002, Shinseki selected Batiste to lead the famed First Infantry Division—“the Big Red One,” which had been first ashore at Normandy—and Batiste spent much of the next year and a half in either Kosovo or Turkey (from which an invasion of Iraq from the north was once planned) or at its base in Würzburg, Germany. When, in December 2003, the 22,000-member force deployed to Tikrit, Wolfowitz flew over to Würzburg to bid everyone good-bye. A former brigade commander who’d learned to get along with the restive population in Bosnia, Batiste went to work to placate Iraqis, riled up by the American commander he had replaced, logging 800 hours in his helicopter visiting mayors, governors, soldiers, and sheikhs. Rejecting Rumsfeld’s revised rules for detention and interrogation helped. “I remember asking the question ‘Who’s read the Geneva Conventions?’” he recalls. “And why aren’t we using them as our foundation? Let’s get rid of all [Rumsfeld’s weakened alternatives]—burn it.”

Whenever he could, he says, he complained to superiors about the problems he faced, particularly troop shortages. During one of Wolfowitz’s visits, he griped to him about the “shell game” they’d been forced to play with scarce American soldiers, moving them from one hot spot to another, allowing the insurgents to pop back up in their wake. “He certainly listened, but, clearly, nothing changed,” Batiste says. (Martha Raddatz, of ABC News, remembers seeing Batiste’s outspoken wife, Michelle, confront a startled Wolfowitz during one visit to Germany over the extended tours G.I.’s were being asked to serve in Iraq, apparently addressing the deputy secretary of defense with an impertinence her husband had never shown.)

On the outside, Batiste remained one of the war’s most reliable and enthusiastic champions until the end of his stay. “I could not be prouder of our collective accomplishments in Iraq,” he declared on June 6, 2005, at a dedication of a memorial at the army base in Würzburg to the fallen of the First Division. But Batiste says he was an anguished man that day, torn up over whether those soldiers he’d just eulogized had really died for nothing besides a bronze statue halfway around the world, and torn up, too, over his own future.

Two months earlier, Batiste had been offered the post of deputy commander of the army’s V Corps, which would have brought him back to Iraq as the second-in-command of the entire American force there. The job would have earned him his third star and maybe fourth. Leading a corps is the most coveted of positions; no one ever turns it down. But to Batiste there was a hitch: General Ricardo Sanchez would remain nominally in charge. To move or promote Sanchez, on whose watch Abu Ghraib occurred, would require Senate confirmation, something Bush-administration officials obviously didn’t relish. Better to leave him be, they reasoned, at least until things cooled down.

To the Pentagon brass, and even to some of Batiste’s friends, the situation, while novel and delicate, was eminently manageable. Everyone knew that Sanchez would have been only a “figurehead,” says Raymond DuBois, the former undersecretary of the army and Rumsfeld aide who handled the matter. But much as he wanted the job, Batiste says, the arrangement undermined the sacred military principle of unity of command—the notion that the buck must stop in only one place. The maneuver also epitomized what to him was another of Rumsfeld’s cardinal sins: politicizing the military. He says he shared his concerns with the army chief of staff, Peter Schoomaker. “The answer was ‘John, I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do about it,’” he says. Schoomaker’s hands were tied.

Over several months and many sleepless nights, Batiste equivocated. He accepted, then backed off. His doubts about American military strategy, and the Iraqi commitment to democracy, had grown. Haunting him, too, was the example of General Harold K. Johnson, about whom he had studied at the Army War College. As army chief of staff during Vietnam, the general felt Lyndon Johnson had handed him an unwinnable war and a plan violating every principle of warfare, and resolved to resign in protest. But he never did, and he never forgave himself afterward. “I am now going to my grave with that lapse in moral courage on my back,” he declared late in life. In June 2005, Batiste turned down the job, quit the army, and came back home. (DuBois disputes this account, claiming that Batiste was willing to take a different three-star post, but that Schoomaker rejected the idea. Batiste says this is not so.) The decision stunned and saddened his colleagues. “You can’t lose Batistes,” says one prominent general, still active. “There aren’t many of them.”

In November, Batiste began a job as president of Klein Steel, a small, family-owned concern in Rochester. But only last April, after his friend Paul Eaton, whom he knew from the Balkans, had published his article, did he talk. And talk he has continued to do, ever since. He says the army is now run by technocrats and bureaucrats rather than experienced warriors. “There’s a bunch of those guys I’d not want my sons going to fight with,” he says. He’s attacked the Iraqis: he’s never met one who understands democracy. The commander in chief, too, is no longer off limits: “It just seems like he doesn’t have a grip on what’s going on,” Batiste says.

Batiste’s frequent media appearances have rankled some retired generals. “Most of these other guys were captured a bit,” says an extremely prominent one. “Reporters were dialing and asking them questions, and they’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.’ But Batiste has an agenda, and he’s not letting go.” Some feel he’s being used by anti-war activists, or Democrats. Others think that he’s atoning for his failure to speak up sooner, or that he’s succumbed to the siren song of the sound bite. But even most of Batiste’s critics consider him exemplary; the worst they can say about him is that he’s overly idealistic or overwrought or confused. Even some of his friends fear he’s in a bit over his head. More than one mentioned another inherently sympathetic character who got sullied through overexposure: anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan. Not to worry, replies Batiste, who says he turns down 9 out of 10 interview requests. And slowly he’s leaving the military behind. “My uniforms are all down in a closet in the house, and until this instant I’d forgotten that they were there,” he tells me. “They’ll sit there until I give them to the Goodwill or something.”

Courage Under Fire

Three-star general John Riggs, 60, should have been Donald Rumsfeld’s kind of guy. He was the head of the army’s Objective Force Task Force, the group charged with developing a lighter, lither army, built around “Future Combat Systems” of high-tech armored vehicles, drones, and sensors. The problem may have been that he was General Shinseki’s guy as well—it was he who’d named Riggs to the job—not to mention one of Shinseki’s closest friends.

The tension was apparent at a meeting in early 2004, when army generals from all over the world, Shinseki among them, assembled in Virginia to discuss transformation. Rumsfeld arrived midway and promptly expressed his doubts. “He said, ‘I venture to say that there’s not a person in this room—I know I don’t—who understands this Future Combat Systems program,’” recalls Riggs, whom Scientific American had listed among the country’s top 50 technology leaders a year earlier. “I told him, ‘Respectfully, Mr. Secretary, you’re wrong. I understand. And I’d venture to say the majority of this room understands.’ His comeback was ‘Well, you need to come educate me.’ I said, ‘I’d love to.’ And it never happened.” Three years later, the episode still galls Riggs. Rumsfeld and his associates, he says, “were almost psychopathic in their quest to be right.”

In January 2004, Riggs, an enlisted man who had been awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross in Vietnam, had another, far more fateful, run-in with Rumsfeld: defying the Rumsfeld party line, Riggs felt the army should be bigger, and said so, in print, to Tom Bowman of The Baltimore Sun. In his 39 years in the service, he complained, he’d never seen it stretched so thin. Bowman, now at National Public Radio, subsequently reported that when Wolfowitz saw the story he angrily summoned General George W. Casey, then the army’s vice chief of staff, to his office to explain such effrontery. When Casey didn’t come quickly enough, Wolfowitz went to him and chewed him out loudly enough for staffers outside the office to hear.

Not surprisingly, Casey then called Riggs. “He was searching for my ass,” Riggs says. Casey skewered him for contradicting the administration’s position, told him to “stay in your lane,” then demanded to know when Riggs planned to retire. He’d already put in his papers, Riggs replied.

If the administration wanted to punish Riggs for his heresy, it had a club with which to beat him: in early 2003, an anonymous tipster charged that Riggs had delegated too much authority to private contractors and had had an affair with one. The army’s inspector general found no such affair but upheld the charge about the contractors. That prompted General John M. Keane, then the army’s second-in-command, to write a “memorandum of concern” to Riggs. By most accounts, it was a slap on the wrist for a petty infraction. Even Keane now says it was a “minor, minor” offense. But in 2004 it led the acting secretary of the army, Les Brownlee, to strip Riggs of a star—a drastic, humiliating step, normally meted out only in cases of extreme moral turpitude, costing Riggs as much as $15,000 a year in pension benefits. “He got a raw deal,” says Keane, who along with more than 40 other generals—Shinseki and Tommy Franks among them—wrote letters on Riggs’s behalf. Other pleas to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were in vain; in April 2004, Casey gave Riggs 24 hours to get out of the army. When, the next day, some sergeant in a basement at Fort Myer, Virginia, handed him a flag and a form letter from George W. Bush, Riggs’s nearly four-decade-long military career came to an abrupt end.

Riggs believes that as a noted micro-manager Rumsfeld would have been aware of what was happening—“I’d be quite surprised if he didn’t know that one of his three-stars was leaving town on a rail”—and that, even if he didn’t do him in, the climate of intolerance he had created did. And Riggs believes that Brownlee, seeking to curry favor with the defense secretary, was happy to do his dirty work. (Brownlee insists that his decision was based on the inspector general’s report and not on political considerations; Di Rita maintains that Rumsfeld would not even have known who Riggs was.) Riggs fled Washington for Florida, where he began selling and installing modular homes. Later, he went into consulting. He did not join the calls for Rumsfeld’s head until National Public Radio contacted him, but he’s very pleased he did. “It created the groundswell that caused Rumsfeld to be gone, period,” he says. “It made him the lightning rod he always should have been.”

Of the six, he may be the most explicitly vindicated: everyone, including the president of the United States, now says the army is too small. But Riggs, who is advising Senator Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, in his presidential bid, isn’t gloating. He’s thinking, instead, of all the soldiers “involved in this morass.” I ask him how many more of them will die before it’s over. “I can’t do that,” he says quietly. “It’s too painful to think about.”

Second Thoughts

The military motif in two-star general Chuck Swannack’s house in North Carolina begins with the wooden wreath at the front door. HOME IS WHERE THE ARMY SENDS US—THE SWANNACK FAMILY, it declares. Hanging from it are pendants, each representing a stop in Swannack’s long career. Along with West Point and the Pentagon, there are all those Forts—Polk, McNair, Ord, Bragg, Leavenworth, Benning—representing the places from which he went off to Haiti, Panama, Bosnia, and, finally, Iraq.

But there’s one catch: the Swannacks are no longer much of a family. His twins are grown, and he’s separated from his wife. “A heartless robot,” he says she’s called him, and he relates it incredulously, mournfully, for he’s still trying to patch things up. He lives alone, in a rented place he’s turned into a shrine to the 82nd Airborne, the legendary paratrooper corps he commanded from October 2002 to May 2004, and a gallery of Saddam Hussein—abilia. His fractured family helps explain why the toughest of the six dissenting generals is also the most fragile and regretful.

In photographs, striding purposefully before his troops in his maroon paratrooper’s beret and desert camouflage, Swannack, who made 153 jumps himself, is a frightening guy. “Chuck Swannack moved to the sound of the gun,” the commander of Fort Bragg said when “Swan Dawg” retired. That’s how he came across—as “General Swank”—in Combat Zone: True Tales of GIs in Iraq, published by Marvel Comics in 2005. (The writer, Karl Zinsmeister, is now President Bush’s chief domestic-policy adviser.) Confederate general Stonewall Jackson is his hero, and in his living room is a print of Stonewall, praying. At West Point, he was captain of the golf team, and he can still drive a ball forever. He bade Iraq good-bye by hitting six Stratas into the Euphrates.

But even men of steel can have feet of clay.

Swannack went to Iraq twice, first in early 2003, when 7,500 paratroopers of the 82nd marched into Baghdad rather than jumped in, as had originally been planned. Then, from August 2003 to March 2004, he commanded the force occupying and attempting to pacify the notorious al-Anbar Province. It was classic counter-insurgency: meeting with the locals, buying them off, giving them jobs, respecting them, mollifying them, intimidating them, and, when necessary, fighting and killing them. Rumsfeld never reached Ramadi, where Swannack was based, in still another of Saddam’s palaces—it was just too dangerous. (A piece of wood with Saddam’s initials carved into it, taken from a doorframe, is among Swannack’s prized mementos.)

Swannack had all of the usual gripes, about troop shortages, de-Ba‘thification, underestimating the insurgency, problems equipping Iraqi soldiers. Sometimes, at press conferences, he aired his complaints. Once, ignoring the administration’s party line, he said that Saddam Hussein had planned the insurgency; General John Abizaid, the head of Central Command, quickly rejected that idea, publicly. (Both Abizaid and Wolfowitz later told Swannack he’d been right.) “I felt that Big Brother was watching, and if he saw something he didn’t like, I’d be slammed for it,” he says.

During and after Swannack’s second tour in Iraq, everything unraveled. His marriage, which had managed to survive all those deployments abroad, finally disintegrated, and he had an affair—fairly routine in civilian life, but enough in the military to trigger an investigation. He began taking antidepressants. It became evident that he would not get a third star, and he had to think about life post-military. He turned down a civilian job offer from Kellogg, Brown & Root, the military-industrial behemoth provisioning the war effort—“I figured three times in Iraq was one too many”—and came home.

Abu Ghraib, the Marine assault on Fallujah, the assault on the militia of Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr: all, he feels, undid the good work he had done in Iraq. Early last April, as teams of reporters fanned out to find additional anti-Rumsfeld generals, Eric Schmitt of The New York Times caught up with Swannack, who added his name to the list. Then he changed his mind. Then, with Schmitt pleading the importance of making his views known, he jumped back in. “Emotionally, I had a lot of rocks in my rucksack,” he now says. “They all got heavier and heavier, and I needed to unburden myself or it would take me down.” But, for a variety of reasons, he says, he wouldn’t do it again.

There was one angry e-mail: a West Point classmate called him a traitor. And Booz Allen Hamilton, the global-strategy firm which he says was poised to offer him a lucrative consulting job, got cold feet once he made the papers. (The company acknowledges the discussion but says Swannack had not yet been formally interviewed.) But most upsetting was the reaction from his own soldiers, who were flabbergasted—and, depending on how well they knew him, either disappointed or enraged—by what he had done. As one of Swannack’s men puts it, paratroopers simply don’t complain—unless, that is, there’s not enough fighting going on—and even some of Swannack’s friends felt that his comments brought dishonor to the corps. When I tell one of Swannack’s devoted men that he’s since had second thoughts, he says he is relieved.

The American death toll in Iraq has passed 3,000 when Swannack and I get together, and as we drive down Interstate 77 for some barbecue, I ask him what, in a year’s time, the figure will be. “Thirty-six hundred,” he replies matter-of-factly. And by the time it is all over? “Seven thousand, seventy-five hundred.” Still, he supports the surge. “I’m an optimist, because I think the cause is just,” he says. But, he concedes, the Iraqis could “go south on us.” He hopes there’s a Plan B.

Of Fathers and Sons

Asigned photograph of former president George H. W. Bush hangs in the home of Lieutenant General and Mrs. Paul Van Riper, in Williamsburg, Virginia, near his enormous library on the art and science of war, not far from the bullet-scarred helmet and belt he wore in Southeast Asia. “To Rip and L.C. with so many thanks for your hospitality, with great pride in your service to the U.S.A.,” Bush the elder wrote, after staying with them once a decade ago. But Van Riper isn’t so high on Bush’s son. “Unless something in the next few years happens, I think historians will nail him,” he says.

At 68, Van Riper is the oldest of the six generals, old enough to have had two tours in Vietnam, where he left behind his spleen and a piece of his intestines. He is also the most famous, highlighted in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, and, on martial matters, the most erudite. (Gladwell depicts him as shrewd, iconoclastic, and fearless—a sophisticated gunslinger.) Whenever he and his pal former CentCom commander Tony Zinni, who lives just down the road, talk war on their regular bass-fishing trips, it’s so technical that only a few people in the world can decipher what they’re saying. He retired as a Marine three-star four years before Bush the younger put Rumsfeld in the Pentagon. “Rumsfield,” Van Riper calls him.

But Van Riper kept bumping up against him. Like some of the other generals, he was skeptical of “transformation,” believing that technology offered no substitute for “boots on the ground.” He’d seen the grim results of such thinking in Vietnam, when leaders trained for nuclear war and in love with systems analysis flailed away fighting guerrillas. Then came “Millennium Challenge ’02,” the $250 million war game Gladwell examined. As a paid consultant, Van Riper led the forces of a generic Islamic tyrant that sank 16 American ships in what one writer called the “worst naval defeat since Pearl Harbor.” But the highly critical report Van Riper wrote afterward was never declassified—an example, he believed, of the groupthink that permeated Rumsfeld’s Defense Department and the generals he promoted.

Then the real war came. Van Riper watched aghast as the Americans went in with far fewer soldiers than had been called for in a war plan he’d been shown a few months earlier. “I was thinking, Where is everybody?” he recalls. Friends in the Pentagon told him that time-honored methods of deploying men and matériel had been jettisoned. Then his son, Steve, 36, a Marine major, returned from Iraq with fresh horror stories. Van Riper had devoted his career to fixing a military broken by Vietnam, and here it was all unraveling.

In 2004, Van Riper spoke to the PBS program Frontline and called Rumsfeld arrogant, disdainful of others, lawless, and ignorant. Whenever Rumsfeld appeared on television, he told the interviewer, he had to shut off his set. But those comments never made it on the air, just on the program’s Web site. Van Riper joined the other generals only when The Washington Post called in April 2006. The day after Rumsfeld was canned, Van Riper saved the front pages of the Post, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today as keepsakes. Only once before had he done something like that: when men first landed on the moon.

Half a million troops would be needed in Iraq to pacify things, he says; with that hardly in the cards, “we are likely to end this war as we began, with too few forces on the ground.” In the meantime, Steve Van Riper has just returned from his second tour in Iraq. The blue star his father hung in the window of Steve’s bedroom, signifying a son or daughter in the military, is still there, though Van Riper doubts that, even in his own neighborhood, filled with military personnel, many people know what it means.

The Pen Is Mightier

Until his article in Time, Greg Newbold was best known outside the insular world of the Marines and the rarefied offices of the Pentagon for a single word: “eviscerated.”

“Eviscerated” was how, in a Pentagon press briefing in October 2001, Newbold had described the state of Taliban fighters after American air strikes early in the war in Afghanistan. Quickly, mockingly, Rumsfeld made it clear he wasn’t pleased with Newbold’s terminology: better to underpromise and overdeliver, he believed, than the other way around. “Sometimes they might use a word that I might not, or sometimes they might use a word that they won’t again,” Rumsfeld said, as an adoring press laughed. Back then Rumsfeld briefings were still must-see TV, even internationally, and one top general who’d tuned in that day recalls how sorry for Newbold he felt. “I remember thinking, Oh, man, that’s got to hurt,” he recalls. “It was a little of the way Shinseki was dismissed.”

Around the Pentagon, “eviscerated”—a word apparently considered too highfalutin for any Marine to use properly—became a running gag. Myers joked about it with Tim Russert. Soon, it was the basis of a stock line in Wolfowitz’s speeches. Pentagon briefers knew better than to employ the word. There was little danger Newbold ever would again; Rumsfeld essentially banned him from further public appearances. That was fine by Newbold; putting himself on public display had never been something he relished, and, besides, it kept him from his real work.

In fact, Newbold’s choice of words that day was quite characteristic: succinct, articulate, accurate, unvarnished. Others may have bled for him over Rumsfeld’s put-down, but he let the whole thing go. “I had bigger issues with him,” he says. “It was not a secret that Rumsfeld and I were not on our respective Christmas-card lists.”

Among the six generals, Newbold is the most reticent. You have to chase him down, though he is unfailingly courteous once caught. Amid the ramrods, he stands straightest. He never swears—as a young officer, he concluded that it diminished his authority—and until the midterm elections of 2006 he had never voted: like his father, an air-force pilot, he never wanted to serve someone he hadn’t supported.

Newbold waived that rule last year to back his old friend James Webb, another retired Marine, who is now the Democratic senator from Virginia, even though he warned Webb beforehand that a radioactive general might do him more harm than good. When, as the newest member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Webb praised those military men “of moral conscience” whom the Bush administration had “demeaned” and “destroyed” for their opposition to the war, Newbold was among those he had in mind. Then, in the Democratic response to Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address, Webb listed Newbold on the honor roll of military officials who’d counseled against the war.

Newbold, 58, who met his wife while both were Marine captains training newly commissioned lieutenants at Quantico, speaks in a deep baritone that belies his slight stature. He has a dry wit. He is—it’s a strange word to use for a Marine, let alone the one who led the first boatload into Mogadishu in 1992—sensitive, almost tender, though there is clearly leather beneath the velvet. He is self-effacing, even self-lacerating. The other generals talk about how much they took on Rumsfeld; Newbold talks about how little, and how much more he should have.

In the summer of 2000, the Marine Corps commandant, James Jones, picked Newbold to be the director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or J3, supervising 300 employees at the Pentagon. It’s probably the most important three-star job in the military, a well-worn stepping-stone to four stars and, maybe, commandant. Still, Newbold says he really didn’t want the job; he enjoyed commanding troops more. And, because he came along in the wrong administration, it proved his undoing.

Rumsfeld—newly arrived, eager to assert his authority over what he considered a flabby and recalcitrant military and a Pentagon filled with Clinton holdovers—looked for targets, and Newbold, who actually didn’t much respect Clinton (he thought him a “weather vane,” devoid of core beliefs) was in plain sight. “Greg was kind of the first one to catch that full in the face,” says a retired admiral who watched it happen. “Rumsfeld wanted to come in and kick a few butts, and Greg’s was the butt that was kicked.”

Newbold witnessed numerous Pentagon briefings in which an always exasperated Rumsfeld forever harped on the incompetence all around him—“Can’t anyone count numbers?” he might say—and says plenty of others got it far worse than he did. Still, he says, the secretary of defense once abused him so badly that he was moved to complain to Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant, Admiral Edmund Giambastiani. If Rumsfeld ever so disrespected him again, Newbold said, he would “put his stars on the table”—that is, resign. “And Admiral Giambastiani said, ‘Oh, Greg, you know, it’s too bad, but that’s the way he deals with people, and he doesn’t mean anything by it. It’s just his style.’ And I said, ‘It isn’t with me. You make sure he knows it.’

“When I hung up, I realized I had done something fairly consequential, so I informed the commandant, and I informed General Myers,” he continues. Myers, too, defended Rumsfeld’s poor manners to him, also saying he treated everyone like that. “I said, ‘You should never put up with it,’ ” he recalls. “General Myers worked a different way than I did. That means he’s probably more mature and wiser and has much greater judgment on these things.” Underlings sensed Newbold’s frustration, though he never voiced it to them; returning from meetings, he would simply point to the framed sampler that hung, and still hangs, on his wall: PEOPLE ARE NO DARNED GOOD, it says.

Of far greater concern to him was the headlong rush to war in Iraq. It was apparent early on—from two or three days after 9/11, when, with the smoke from the smoldering Pentagon still in the air, Newbold told Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, of plans to go into Afghanistan. “Why are you going into Afghanistan?” he says Feith replied. “We ought to be going after Iraq.” (Feith has previously denied saying this; Newbold says he’d take a polygraph on the point. Feith declined to talk to VANITY FAIR.) It simply isn’t possible now, says Newbold, to fathom how “extraordinarily inappropriate” Feith’s comments sounded at the time. Then, at a meeting a few months later, as the Americans chased the leadership of al-Qaeda, he says he heard Wolfowitz say essentially the same thing. In each instance, Newbold’s reaction was the same: “Who cares about Iraq? We have this three-penny dictator, this bantam rooster of no consequence. Besides, they’re quiet now anyway—who cares?”

Then came what was, to Newbold, that fateful meeting in late 2001 when Rumsfeld requested the war plan for Iraq. Newbold had just begun his slide show, describing the size of the force and means of deployment, when the belittlement began. “As was his style,” Newbold says, “he had already declared the answer, and had already categorized anyone who might think differently as—these are my words—antediluvian, Cro-Magnon, backward-thinking, hopeless. It was so pointed, so derogatory, so negative about the number [of troops required under the existing plan] that General Myers then said, ‘If not this number, then what number do you think [the plan] ought to have?’”

It was, Newbold says, a “horrible question.” I ask why. “Because that question ought to be answered by those who know most about how to put together a plan that can accomplish the mission,” he tells me. “It was no more appropriate than for me to suggest play-calling to [Coach] Joe Gibbs of the Washington Redskins.” Rumsfeld’s alternative estimate of troops needed was “imbecilic, preposterous,” but Newbold failed to object. According to Newbold, so did Myers, and so did Pace, who, when Myers retired as chairman, would be elevated to his spot. “Funny how that works,” Newbold observes.

Afghanistan fell in late 2001, and as it became increasingly apparent that a war with Iraq, based on what he considered to be manipulated and cherry-picked evidence, was in the offing, Newbold took the step General Harold Johnson never had: he offered his resignation, to General Jones, the commandant. And it came with a message: Jones should feel free to tell everyone he was resigning in protest. Jones was noncommittal, and Newbold stayed: the president, at least, was still saying war was not inevitable.

But by June 2002, Newbold had given up. Unwilling to move his family yet again, eager to clear a bureaucratic bottleneck and open a path for some younger Marine, he again offered his resignation, even though, by leaving ahead of schedule, he could have lost two stars. This time, Jones accepted. Before departing, Newbold says he reiterated his objections to the impending war to the chairman, vice-chairman, and key generals and admirals in the Pentagon hierarchy. Such a war was justified, he argued, only if Iraq threatened its neighbors, harbored terrorists, or had weapons of mass destruction. None of those, he believed, was true.

In late September, Rumsfeld and Pace said good-bye to him before the Pentagon press corps. Rumsfeld’s press office had put together a joke video for the occasion, built around the “evisceration” clip. Some of Newbold’s friends were indignant anew to see a 30-year military career boiled down to a barbed joke. But Newbold, who’d accepted a job at a Washington think tank, took it all good-naturedly. He rejected the usual lavish retirement ceremony at the Marine Barracks—“As I told the commandant, ‘I don’t want my last act as a Marine to be to make Marines work for me’”—and opted instead for a small gathering at the Army-Navy Club, in Alexandria. Just about the only man in uniform to come was his old friend John Abizaid. It was poignant, says someone who was there; everyone knew that Newbold was retiring prematurely, and that it was the country’s loss. But Newbold himself kept it from becoming too funereal.

Newbold didn’t let on anything with the press. “I am a square peg in a round hole” was how he explained his decision to Tom Ricks of The Washington Post. He became a consultant to ABC News. He took Peter Jennings around Kuwait and Qatar, introducing him to military brass, explaining how the war-to-be would work. Once the fighting started he did some on-air analysis, but television work smacked of ego to him, and he soon stopped. He made an exception for a Primetime documentary on Rumsfeld in March 2004, when ABC Pentagon correspondent John McWethy asked him whether Rumsfeld was “abusive and brash.” “Oh, absolutely,” he replied, adding that people clammed up when they were intimidated or debased. It was a terse response to a leading question. But from someone so upright and discreet, McWethy says, it carried enormous weight, especially among the other generals: Newbold was saying what they all thought.

Over the next two years Newbold maintained his silence, speaking only to Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor for Cobra II, their book on the lead-up to the Iraq war. (It was to them that he first described the meeting in late 2001 with Rumsfeld.) Speaking out, he feared, could undermine the troops in the field—another legacy of Vietnam. Then there was the Marine ethic, which frowned on anything resembling ambition or self-aggrandizement. More than deteriorating conditions in Iraq, more than Condoleezza Rice’s claim that “thousands” of tactical—read “military”—errors had been made in Iraq, what ultimately persuaded him to talk were his weekly visits to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, made on behalf of the Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund, of which he became a director in 2003.

Newbold walks over to his computer, fiddles around with the mouse, and calls up a photograph for me. “Here’s one of the Marines we helped out,” he explains quietly. “He was unconscious when I saw him.” On the screen is a bewildered-looking young man being lifted out of a chair. He has lost his legs, and his head looks lopsided, like a clay pot on a wheel before it has been centered: part of his brain was also blown away. Seeing these horribly maimed men and women, who for all their injuries want nothing more than to go and rejoin their buddies in Iraq, was very inspiring, says Newbold. But it was also infuriating, and as he speaks, even across a table, one can feel something welling up in him. It is indignation; the war to which they were all sent, the war that has marked them for life, is, to him, foolish and dishonest and unnecessary, and, worst of all, predictably so. “Any military leader dispatching young soldiers and Marines to something less noble than those soldiers and Marines themselves is committing a blasphemy,” he then says.

Newbold is bitter about the ideologues who, he feels, hijacked American military policy, but they are not his department. What angers him more are his former superiors and colleagues, the men with all those stars on their shoulders. “When you look around at how many people were in positions to raise their voices, senior military leaders who had a duty to object, and how many did—I’m having trouble counting how many did,” he says, his voice intensifying. “I’m having trouble getting above one. But I know, personally, how many thought this whole thing was crazy. And if the military had said, ‘We won’t be a part of this,’ then it wouldn’t have been. They couldn’t have done it publicly, but they could have given their best military advice. And it was their duty.”

Reflecting on all this as time passed, his bile mounted. Finally, he agreed to write the article—for Time, he says, because he believed it would be read beyond the Beltway, in Iowa and Oregon and Mississippi. He’d planned something forward-looking, he says, but what poured out instead was an assault on the politicians who’d led the country into Iraq and the generals who’d gone along. American forces had been sent to Iraq, he wrote, “with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions—or bury the results.” He mentioned no generals by name, nor, for that matter, the secretary of defense; only when the editors leaned on him did he put Rumsfeld in, and call for him to be replaced. It was a mistake, he now believes; what was intended as a serious critique morphed into the debut of the latest revolting general.

Asked about the article at a Pentagon press conference, Rumsfeld said he had not read it, then claimed that Newbold had never objected, publicly or privately, before. Pace, who was at Rumsfeld’s side that day, quickly corrected him, but noted that Newbold had in fact left the Pentagon before the war plan was finalized. Di Rita makes the same point: to say that troop strength in Iraq was fixed by diktat so early on is an “urban legend.” Newbold, he suggests, is both flattering and flagellating himself unnecessarily. Doesn’t matter, Newbold insists: he still should have said something.

Richard Kohn, of the University of North Carolina, who criticized the retired generals for violating traditions of civilian control, is particularly harsh on Newbold, claiming that, by suggesting that the military should resist legitimate civilian directives, he was calling for insurrection. “Highly improper is an understatement,” he tells me. To Newbold, Kohn and other civilian critics are “dilettantes” or defensive and discredited neocons or Monday-morning quarterbacks, the kind who’ve never worn pads.

“Every military officer must have a limit to what he’s willing to subordinate to pure obedience, and I can’t think of a limit that is more important than the sacrifice of the young patriots to what the nation called them to do,” he says. “And if you see it so flagrantly abused, then I think I personally set a limit, and that limit was crossed. To the man who has no limit I have only sympathy.”